Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.

2009 AIIM International Exposition + Conference

The World’s Leading Enterprise Content Management Gathering

Philadelphia’s Convention Center was the site of the seventh annual AIIM Expo and Conference on March 30 through April 2. Held in conjunction with the On Demand Conference, preregistration for the two conclaves was reported by the organizers to be comparable to 2008 or about 20,000 attendees. This figure would make this is the largest convention among all those convened in Philadelphia. Exhibitor participation was likewise strong with over 300 trade show booths.

AIIM seminars comprised 19 tracks and 130+ conference sessions featuring over 100 case studies. This gathering claims to be the world's largest and most important annual event for the Content and Information Management industry. Records Managers and IT buying teams attend to learn the optimal means for capturing, storing, managing, finding, sharing, compiling and analyzing information.

Publishers, corporate brand owners and media buyers, comprise a segment of this enterprise content management (ECM) arena that AIIM engulfs. However, printers must clearly be selecting technologies, work flows, and business processes that are both consistent and compatible with those strategically delineated for the entire company by their client IT departments. This conference accomplished just that. Hence, this article will concentrate solely on the AIIM Conference highlights rather than the more familiar On Demand Conference.

The President of AIIM, John Mancini traditionally highlights the annual “State of the ECM Industry” as a keynote address. In summary this report found that managing electronic office documents is still challenging to 47% of organizations. Modern business communication channels – instant messages, text messages, blogs, twitters, RSS, and wikis – are uncontrolled and off the corporate radar for 75% of businesses. However, this research found that whereas two years ago compliance was the main driver for bringing this content into a controlled and searchable environment, cost savings and efficiency are now the main motivating factors.

As a most appropriate and timely illustration of how content management and web 2.0 can and should work, Mancini outlined the lessons learned from how these technologies contributed to Obama winning the Presidency. The statistics were drawn from the article “Barack Obama: How Content Management and Web 2.0 Helped Win the White House” by Garrett M. Graff appearing in the March-April 2009 issue of Infonomics (infonomicsmag.com)

Lesson #1: Enterprise Web 2.0 (E2.0) is not going away.

In 2007 Obama spent $2.0 million in IT infrastructure. IT was not a “bolt on” but an integral part of the political strategic planning process. The Obama IT team, which numbered 90 by the end of the campaign, managed 100 websites, which greatly facilitated the recruitment of volunteers and the unheard of quantity of 3 million individual contributors to the campaign coffers.

Lesson #2: E 2.0 is a tool, not a strategy.

The Obama camp overcame the classic three ECM implementation problems, which corporate practitioners confess to encounter with regularity. They are (1) process and organizational issues, (2) poor procedures and enforcement, and (3) lack of adequate internal training.

Lesson #3: It’s still marketing!!!

Here are a few of the statistics to verify the penetration offered by this new media.

                              Obama           McCain
Facebook;
   Members              5 million       600 thousand
   Special features  Video links     none
YouTube;	
   Videos               1,827           330
   Views                120 million     26 million
   Subscribers       149 thousand    28 thousand

The Obama Brand was effectively segmented across demographics. His famous 37-minute speech on race delivered in Philadelphia was later viewed by 8 million on YouTube, which was far more than saw it live on television. The Obama camp had dedicated specialized iPhone applications and an exhaustive library of 3 million cellphone numbers, which were used extensively in custom text messaging particularly in the last few days and hours leading up to election day. In October just before the election Obama’s campaign for the first time ever was advertising on Xbox games!

Lesson #4: It’s about organizing, not networking!

Using MySQL™ and PHP, a single core database to serve all MyBarackObama.com (MyBO…imaginative acronym!) users in all their core activities – donations, social networking, and activism. (MySQL™ is a widely used open source database; PHP, launched in 1994 as “Personal Home Page,” is a widely used scripting language for producing dynamic Web pages). Needless to say neither the candidate nor any key staffer exhibited any webophobia. Both the McCain and Clinton camps were reported to exhibit regular friction between their online staffs and the more traditional senior staff.

John Stenbet, former CIO of the United States Department of Defense, in his keynote address offered a historical perspective on the use of timely information via metadata and the use of the Internet, bandwidth, and computer storage capacities. Following the capture of US spyship Pueblo by the North Koreans in 1973 when computers and communications were more rudimentary, the Pentagon did not realize that there were ample US fighter aircraft available only minutes away that could have extricated LTC Lloyd Bucherer and his crew. Unfortunately they learned this four days later – three days too late. While modern computers and communications wastes bandwidth, wastes computer storage space, and wastes computing power, the Internet allows “smart pull mode” of operations. Of course applications software and business processes must be in place to take full advantage of the Internet. Such resources are available today. Whether in military ops or in the business world, the goal of ECM targets “the individual (having the means) to solve the problem in front of them as being more important than someone else remotely solving his problem.”

The CIO panel discussed further personal case studies comprising their experiences on implementing corporate wide enterprise content management. Mike McKuras, Vice President of Information Technology Services for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, described the practical problem of each of the thirty BCBSs across the nation. The corporate goal of having one common information platform would allow the leveraging and sharing of information across 30 different (BCBS) silos. However, currently the power of each department rests in its own information; and there are multiple departments within each BCBS entity.

The key, according to McKuras, is to start small. “A project that saves costs gets the most attention.” Similarly “tailored (personalized) communications to prospects and clients (to improve customer service and revenues) is key.” From his observations “shame, fear, and ROI all work (to motivate cross departmental management to initiate change). Likewise “use pull rather than push strategy and department by department rather than corporate wide (buy in)” will assure more successful implementation.

The Product Manager for Google Enterprise, Mr. Risha Chandra offered the keynote entitled “Collaboration (in the 21st Century) in the Cloud.” Current information models are built around individual (knowledge worker) productivity and particularly leaning toward experts. Now group productivity is being recognized as the break through corporate goal. In order to achieve this we must “rethink how the business process should be. And redesign the actual process.” Cloud computing with data residing in the cloud (the Internet) and available via web browser is clearly an integral part of the solution. Google’s vision for this solution, and its charge to Google Enterprise to implement, will have five elements;

1). A new sharing model around the document not the creator.

Give access of the document to others with each person always editing the latest version. Now it's a living document. Every revision to the document is also available with an audit trail. This would allow real time collaboration.

2). Seamless (universal) accessibility.

Multiple tools/technologies are available across platforms and across all (mobile) devices. There would be no language barriers as gmail would have its own translate button.

3). Simple will win over complex (but NOT light weight).

Most powerful indexing and searching capability in the world. Training would be straight forward, simple, and user intuitive. Voice as well as video chat would be embedded in gmail.

4). Speed matters.

“Big will not beat small anymore. But fast will beat slow,” as Chandra quoted from Rupert Murdoch. “Three-five year software cycles won’t work any longer.

Chandra discussed a recent Yankee Group Research survey: “49% of users feel personal technology (at home) is better than the technology (provided to them) at work, 54% would be more productive at work if they could use their personal technology, and 86% of respondents use unsanctioned (by their employer) consumer technology at work.”

5). New forms of collaboration.

Altostrat (video) started by Google 9 months ago, YouTube, and Twitter are examples. There will be “connect, compliant, and collaborative” capabilities, according to Chandra, “and all shared in a secure way.”

A number of seminars and panel discussions dealt with issues unique to MicroSoft’s SharePoint software. Because so many corporations have invested in and consequently are dependent upon the Microsoft Office™ suite, the purchase of SharePoint by senior management was perceived by IT and overall ops as the “500 pound gorilla” in their midst, i.e. they had nothing to say about its purchase but now must make it work. Jeff Denecke of New York Life shared from a panel that his firm stopped SharePoint implementation due to a lack of governance in place.

Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President for the consultancy Doculabs and moderator of Denecke’s panel, commented, “No one has a perfect governance model (for SharePoint) in place.” Governance provides the corporate rules, policies, and procedures to be followed by users concerning SharePoint. For example, boundaries and integration for records management are key decisions. And tracking engagement documents and the X versions of each must be addressed (in governance protocol). Shawn Ivey, panelist with Grant Thornton, added, “Technically savvy employees are carrying SharePoint further then (governance) rules allow (or anticipated).”

A niche topic of growing interesting and concern is eDiscovery and litigation. Complying with an eDiscovery request from an opposing attorney can be an expensive and time-consuming exercise for any corporation. Many universal ECM packages offered eDiscovery as a module while specialty classifying and tagging entrees promised full integration compatibilities with these ECM big brothers.

Developing standards under the auspices of AIIM has become a focal point of success for so many of the leading ECM software vendors. The proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification was demonstrated at the convention. This specification is intended to make use of web services to ensure content repositories and solutions are able to interoperate independent of differing operating systems and architectures. Users need to access disparate repositories across multiple content management solutions dispersed throughout their organization. When this standard is complete, organizations will no longer be forced to select only one content management repository solution to access information anywhere in the organization. AIIM attendees were able to see the CMIS demonstration at each of the participating vendors' booths, i.e., Alfresco, EMC Corporation, and Nuxeo.

While the digital print applications are among the fastest growing of all corporate hard copy print media, it is only one of a multitude of means of corporate communications dissemination. In fact digital print pales in comparison with the virtual dissemination of information over the Internet via a multitude of computing devices. The creation, control, and security of huge quantities of documents particularly subject to compliant requirements are clearly the front end of this information life cycle, which is clearly AIIM’s domain. AIIM’s strong educational features should attract even more Seybold Readers to future conferences.

Article prepared by C. Clint Bolte, C. Clint Bolte & Associates, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. For additional information please call 717-263-5768, fax 717-263-8945, or e-mail to clint@clintbolte.com.